Friday, May 30, 2014

A Marketplace Of Children: The Fertility Industry

Alana Newman knows the pain caused by the fertility industry. She is a donor-conceived child (via sperm donation) and an egg donor. Newman is also the founder of AnonymousUs.org, which focuses on shedding light on the fertility industry.

Newman has written “Creating A Marketplace of Children: A Donor-Conceived Woman Explains the Harms of Third-Party Reproduction,” in which she shares the questions she had as a child about her own conception, and the painful reality of egg donation. She explains that one reason she chose to donate her own eggs when she was 20 years old was that it was “open:” the child conceived via her eggs could contact her in the future is he/she so wished. Of course, that “openness” only went one way; the woman donating her eggs would never be able to anything more than whether a boy or girl had been conceived via her “donation.”